


heretic

by Batman



Category: Haikyuu!!
Genre: Alternate Universe - Angels & Demons, M/M, also my standard apology to tsukki, it's the closest tag i could find, well not exactly angels and demons
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-02-13
Updated: 2016-02-13
Packaged: 2018-05-20 06:26:51
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 12,164
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5994823
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Batman/pseuds/Batman
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>'Not that I don't appreciate your lust for my little nerd here,' Oikawa says, 'but you work for <i>God</i>. How do you expect to run from <i>God</i>?'</p><p>Kuroo grins, and Kei despairs over it, shamed into silence.</p><p>'I have a fast car,' Kuroo says.</p><p>
  <span class="small">(Modern-day reapers AU)</span>
</p>
            </blockquote>





	heretic

**Author's Note:**

  * Translation into Русский available: [Еретик](https://archiveofourown.org/works/8226272) by [named_Juan](https://archiveofourown.org/users/named_Juan/pseuds/named_Juan)



> HELLO NAUGHTY CHILDREN. HELLO. IT'S ME. DO YOU HAVE A MOMENT TO TALK ABOUT KUROTSUKKI.
> 
> Written originally for Teddy's prompt of "equivalent exchange", this ran away from me. My soul to Mari and Ksenya for reading through it!
> 
> Also, this is inspired in part by the amazing [badjura's](http://badjura.tumblr.com) equally amazing art, which never fails to strike a chord and make me feel so. Very. Many. Things. Thank you for always being an inspiration!

[Asked: Do you know if you are in the grace of God?]

If I am not, may God put me there; and if I am, may God so keep me.

— Third public trial of Jeanne d'Arc

 

They meet in a club. Kei has no time for lazy socialising at night, not on free nights. No, on free nights he runs from the company of the peers he knows to the arms of strangers, even if only to threaten to snap wrists of roving hands or to grab ones that are too rough, too big, too small, too thin. He has no time for lazy socialising at night, not when so few of them actually have free hours for him to breathe and pour alcohol down his throat and not think about the number of cold hands he touches when he doesn't have a free night.

 

They meet in a club when he's done screwing his eyes shut after the assault of the first pair of shots he shares with Sugawara. The gentle man, his beloved barman, never questions Kei's cashmere suits or shaking fingers; only laughs when his tie is crooked (and sometimes his tie is crooked). He never takes money for the first pair of shots, always smiles at Kei right after, says he never finishes sucking the lime completely, and it's true; Kei never finishes sucking the lime completely.

 

They meet in a club on a Saturday night, when he sets his glass down on the rough wooden counter and opens his eyes after screwing them shut too tight. He sets his shot glass down and opens his eyes and turns in his seat.

 

The man is leaning against the counter a couple of feet off, leaning back with his elbows on the wood even though it must be wet from the clumsy grips of drunkards, even though his suit is cashmere too and his sleeves aren't rolled up high enough. The man's hair is a mess, jet black as far as he can tell, but he only notices it after the darkness of his eyelashes on his cheeks. The curve of his back, his limp fingers facing the floor, his long legs crossed at an angle; a figure standing tall and solid against the crowd, and Kei feels more than just the alcohol in his body start to spark. His eyes are closed, his mouth is open, and Kei has never wanted to kiss a _human_ so quickly. The pull puts magnetism to shame.

 

He inches towards the man, and the man smiles as if he knew from the moment Kei looked at him, that Kei was looking at him. He inches towards the man, and the man smiles as if he knows.

 

'You can't,' he says, eyes still closed; and his voice, as it courses through Kei like a streak of light, is low and laughing. 'Don't come any closer.'

 

'Why not?' Kei asks, but he doesn't move.

 

The man opens his eyes, then, looks right at him. That shade of gold, untouched even by the insulting lights of the room, couldn't belong to someone with only blood in their veins. And so Kei realises that he really has never wanted to kiss a _human_ this quickly.

 

'Yes, and?' he says. 'Me too.' If anything, it's a bond, and those aren't unheard of. He'd never quite believed that he'd find his match so soon, if at all; but there is a kind of resonance, certain, under his skin right now. The kind, not that he had ever experienced it before, that he knows to dissolve every doubt, whether for good or not. He has never wanted to kiss a human this quickly.

 

'Not for the same team,' the man says, still smiling. And immediately Kei's gaze goes to his wrist, and the thrumming comes to a stunned stop. His hands almost shake with the inertia of it, and his flinch is physical. The black strokes on the man's now-neon, now-not skin form, clearly, a bow and arrow. 'My apologies, swordsman.'

 

Kei turns away, eyes wide, breath coming shorter than it should. Sugawara surfaces from under the counter holding a pair of glasses, asks with his eyes if it was a success or not.

 

Kei asks for another shot.

 

\---

 

Three shots later— or is it two, he thinks they didn't even need more than two— he's being pushed up against one of the large mirrors in the bathroom. The man looks at him openly, sharply; the calculations that he's making in his head are as clear to Kei as if he were doing them on the mirror itself. The resonance is back, almost a buzzing in his ears, his blood a storm rising to the points of his neck where the man's thumbs are pressing in; his fingers in the hair at the nape of his neck like he could snap it in a moment. Kei hungers after the brim— after the whetstone of his jaw. It would be terrible under his fingertips, he knows, so he raises his hands to confirm.

 

The touch has his eyes closing, and he presses his head harder against the mirror, that it might just shatter under the truth of their act, because then the man is leaning forward. And in the way he fits his lips over Kei, a disconcerting amount of his endless life slots into place.

 

It feels just as electric and wrong as it is supposed to be, a pair of reapers for God and the devil, kissing in the too-dim bathroom of a nightclub. And yet Kei has never believed more that heaven exists, to have created someone like this to kiss him in the too-dim bathroom of a nightclub.

 

'This is fantastically illegal,' he gasps. 'Also, what's your _name_.'

 

'Just kiss me,' the man says. 'I can't believe this. Just kiss me.'

 

\---

 

(When Kei turns thirteen, there is one knock on the main door of their house. Just one, and it could easily have been mistaken for anything other than a knock if it hadn't been accompanied by a thundercrack. 

 

His mother opens the door to a man dressed in blinding white, the only colour on him his blood red tie. It's the only time he sees her at anything less than her stoic best; a paleness on her face and tears in her eyes.

 

'It pays well, you know,' the man, Oikawa, says later. His fingers are graceful around Kei's mother's finest china, and he doesn't take more than one sip of the tea. 'He'll never die.'

 

Kei knows he will always remember the way his mother’s lips are trembling; knows she wants to say _that's the problem_. But she never does, because Oikawa's fingers are graceful around her finest china and his knuckles against their door sounded like the footfall of God.

 

She never does, and the next morning it's Kei biting his lip and holding back whimpers when the sword is branded into the inside of his wrist. More symbolic than anything else, but a clear mark all the same.

 

'My brother works for the devil,' Akiteru laughs from the doorway. 'Now there's a sentence I never knew I wanted to say.'

 

Kei throws a pillow at him.)

 

\---

 

His name is Kuroo Tetsurou. Apart from working to reap souls for heaven, he runs (of all things) a tattoo parlour. It's terrifyingly high-end: clean, bright white walls and hints of silver here and there, complete with red lighting around Renaissance replicas in the waiting room, and a mix of songs on the surround-sound that are of good enough taste that Kuroo's obnoxious grin at putting them on is justified, and that kind of soothing clinical smell that Kei's all too used to.

 

'This is kind of...' Kei clears his throat, squints at a row of pictures. Dragons, roses, thorns. 'Punk. For an angel.'

 

'I'm no more an angel than your boss is a raving red beast with horns,' Kuroo says, frowning at his tablet before putting it away on the desk. 'So. When were you born?'

 

'Twenty one years ago,' Kei says. 'You?' Twenty five is when they stop to age, but Kuroo doesn't look a day older than twenty. Lean, lithe, and so deceptively youthful that it might not actually be a deception, he settles himself into his chair with a kind of lazy poise that distracts Kei just as much as it shouldn't. He isn't in his suit today, wearing instead a loose black shirt over his faded jeans, sleeves rolled up again, his bow and arrow clear on his wrist.

 

But Kuroo grins, then, and it has the kind of feral edge that drives his earlier statement home; _I'm no more an angel than your leader is a beast._ It sends a shiver down Kei's spine that feels like the path of long nails; delicious, nauseating. His teeth are a little too sharp and his lips are so, so red, blood and thunder. A smile like knives. Kei, sitting in a fucking tattoo parlour at two in the afternoon, considers joining the ranks of the sinners he gathers for a living.

 

Kuroo grins, then, and leans over, and says in a stage whisper: 'I saw the '64 Olympics. _Live._ '

 

'Get _out._ '

 

\---

 

Over lunch the next day, he learns that it was in the spring of 1994 (when he hadn't been born yet) that Kuroo had decided to open up a small two-roomer and start to draw on people for a living. Kei isn't completely beyond curiosity (among other human things), but he holds his questions because someone who saw the 1964 Olympics live knows what he wants to share and what he doesn't. It's from that point that the current establishment developed, and apparently Kuroo is a famous artist, something Kei would have known if he took interest in these circles.

 

He, himself, had allowed a bit of pride to colour his face when he showed Kuroo the building of the architecture firm he's going to apply to next summer, on the way to the restaurant. (Kuroo made a wisecrack of the irony of him building things, and he shot right back about the tattoo parlour.)

 

Kuroo drives him to university, too, after lunch. His car is fast and fancy, and the music inside is even fancier. He's one of _those_ people, who live for the road and detest half-hearted drizzles, watch action movies late into the night probably. Kei watches him tap his thumb on the leather-covered steering wheel with its renowned mark, watches him frown and shake his head to the beat, pulling his lip into his mouth, blinking away the sunlight that brightens his eyes unnaturally. They have matching eyes, the two of them, but Kei chooses to hide the colour of his. Kuroo, it seems, either missed the invention of lenses, or just doesn't give a fuck.

 

When they pull up to the gates and Kei makes no move to leave, Kuroo turns to look at him after decidedly staring at the road for a moment. 

 

A lock of hair falls into his eyes, and Kei feels his breath catch in his throat, tightens his fingers on the edge of his seat. Again there is that sharpness in his gaze, the deliberation that Kei knows he should be exercising too. But he is twenty one— he is _only_ twenty one— and Kuroo has eyes that look like they must have been transfixing even before some seraph decided to let him live forever. He sits here right now in a T-shirt that says _be the trouble you want to see in the world,_ but he opened a tattoo parlour three years before Kei was even born _._ Kei imagines him in all the changing fashions of the decades, and wonders how many lovers he's had.

 

_Just kiss me. I can't believe this. Just kiss me._

 

'What're you staring at?' Kuroo pulls a face, crosses his eyes. Kei blinks away his want, and shakes his head. When he steps out, Kuroo rolls the window down and opens his mouth, but then closes it with that same deliberation.

 

In class, Tadashi cocks an eyebrow at him and Kei shakes his head again. That evening, Kageyama and Hinata come over, and he lets their loudness distract him from the memory of that one dark lock of hair. More importantly, he lets their loudness distract him from the memory of wanting to lean over and brush it away.

 

\---

 

Kuroo himself has no tattoos apart from the branded one. Kei finds this out in the worst of ways, the first time he goes over to Kuroo's apartment and manages to spill wine on his shirt. Kuroo, apparently not one for ceremony, takes the hem and lifts it over his head in seconds, laughing and bending slightly over the sink to wash it.

 

The expanse of his back is so aureate and clear; Kei's first instinct is not to touch with his hands (although it's a painful second) but rather to take a pen and draw long strokes right across it. Mark every inch with a defining number; quantify the sheen the light washes on it, over the camber of his shoulder blades through the ridges of his ribs right to where it drops and collects like moonshine in the dip of his spine. 

 

In the minutes Kuroo takes to remove the stain, Kei maps out entire cities, and when he turns around, it's hard to come back to theirs.

 

'If I was into tattoos I'd ask you for one,' Kei says, too distracted to construct context. He wonders where Kuroo learned to ink.

 

Kuroo tilts his head and considers him, narrows his eyes a little. 'Maybe someday,' he says.

 

\---

 

In spite of the conviction the resonance gives him, Kei takes a good month before he turns on his working lamp and shows Kuroo some of his best prints. Even though the tomfool doesn't refrain from cracking jokes here and there, Kei knows that he's interested, impressed. There is a point when he is genuinely absorbed in the lines and numbers, when he pulls up a chair and leans over a drawing the way he must over his own designs. Kei is proud, but only just.

 

'You really want to make houses, huh,' Kuroo says in the silence between one of Kei's perhaps over-enthusiastic explanations.

 

'And schools,' Kei says. 'And maybe a museum one day.'

 

Kuroo whistles lowly, raises his eyebrows. 'Well, I don't doubt that you can do it, and not just because that one day could be literally whenever.' He eases into a grin when Kei laughs, surprised, and reaches for the coffee Kei's put out for him.

 

Wincing when he takes the first sip, he puts it away and glares at Kei. 'God, you students, always thinking it's fashionable to drink the devil's brew.'

 

Kei raises an eyebrow. 'Lovely phrasing.'

 

'Lovely face.'

 

'Lovely— get _out_.'

 

\---

 

The only time he loses himself enough to also lose track of time, is when Kuroo starts telling him stories. There is one occasion when he doesn't notice the sun go down and come back up again, because he's on one end of Kuroo's couch, knees drawn up to his chest and glasses a little too low on his nose, listening in absolute silence to everything Kuroo has to say.

 

He talks about reaping, his kind of reaping. It's been centuries since their swords and bows went out of use, but at the turn of the last one, Kuroo still wore robes. He talks about how stunning it was to pick through the carnage of wars and robberies, _like vultures, I hope you never see that,_ to step over saints and touch the shoulders of soldiers on both sides of a line.

 

Kei, who has only been under Oikawa's guidance for nine years and seen only metal and asphalt as his most violent tragedies, wants to shudder at the accounts he's hearing. He holds his shoulders stubbornly tense and leans his head on his knees, listening more than seeing for once. Kuroo's voice, as rich as the rest of him, changes tones and speeds with every soul he briefly brings back to life and plays in front of Kei.

 

On many nights, Kei has to clear his throat and look people in the eyes that he knows to be murderers, and has to tell them to follow him. Sometimes he has to take their hands, but only to separate lovers, good and bad, saint and sinner. Oikawa has laughed at him and hurt with him in turns, always derisively enough that Kei feels comforted, and Tadashi is just as young as him but never asks follow-up questions.

 

And yet, he has never found as much solace as he does when Kuroo pushes another glassful of wine towards him and half-smiles as if to say _I know._

 

\---

 

They don't talk about the first night at the club, and Kei hasn't been there again since they met, doesn’t really see a point. Any hands he touches now would impinge; he'll take Kuroo's or none.

 

Two months from that night, when he's thoroughly returned to his routine of studying by day, leading the sinful dead by night (Oikawa is actually considerate of a student's needs and allows him _shifts_ ), he caves in to Tadashi's subtle demands and introduces Kuroo to his friends. 

 

They accept him without real questions, even though Hinata has a dozen rudimentary ones about Kuroo's hair, and the tattoo on his wrist (Kei notices the way Tadashi's eyes focus on that immediately, and mentally prepares himself to dodge any questioning later) and when he sees Kuroo reply to all of them with ease and patience, he feels an obligatory tug in his chest for all the little things, and one big thing, that they could have had. Kuroo talks about the historical accuracy of some drama or the other with the guarded enthusiasm of an academic, but Kei knows that he was actually once in a three-hour long argument with the ghost of a boy about it, both having been on opposite sides of the political conflict portrayed in the show.

 

He knows the full stories behind a laughable number of Kuroo's half-truths, and wonders at his own immaturity in thinking that it amounts to nothing because he could only introduce Kuroo as a friend. That it amounts to nothing because they don't talk about the first night at the club.

 

('It's _fun,_ ' Kuroo had said over coffee, referring to how he likes to _fuck around with ghosts._ 'They can't do much to the likes of us so they just throw things around and scare the shit out of others.'

 

'I think we should switch sides,' Kei muttered, and Kuroo laughed, and that laugh was so deep and so darkly amused, so rich. Kei's fingers twitched around his little espresso cup and he thought about terrible things to himself; stepping into puddles, burned toast, damnation. A laugh like that should remain immortal; Kuroo would crumble instantly if he were to fall now.

 

'My interns say the same,' Kuroo said. 'Tell me, am I that obnoxious?'

 

'Probably the only reason you're still alive is because you technically can't be killed,' Kei said, rolled his eyes. 'Drink up, I'm getting late.')

 

It _doesn't_ amount to nothing. They don't talk about the first night at the club, because if someone ever found out, it wouldn't be pretty and its ugliness wouldn't be romantic either; Kei doesn't want Akiteru to be in danger over a half-drunken not-mistake in the dead of the night.

 

So maybe they don't talk about the first night at the club, but it _doesn't_ amount to nothing because they have a bond, and the sting of being apart is turning into an ache, but he gets to see Kuroo compliment Tadashi on his cooking, gets to see Kuroo laugh at Kageyama and Hinata the way he himself does sometimes. They don't talk about the first night at the club, and they have a bond, and maybe Kei is still just as drawn to Kuroo's very scent as he was that first time— but he still hasn't asked where Kuroo learned to ink; they'll just have to deal with it, make the best of each other's company and nothing more.

 

\---

 

They _do_ end up there, though, again. He's taking his first complimentary shot with Sugawara when he feels the change in the air. After nearly four months of what he now just refers to as _the resonance_ fluctuating in accordance with Kuroo's presence, he's become more or less used to his system of telling when the other is around.

 

He's barely finished rolling his eyes at Sugawara's usual _there you go again, leaving half the lime_ and smiling at the barman when Kuroo slides onto the seat beside his. Sugawara smiles at him, knowingly, and Kei had never paused to consider that they're acquaintances too.

 

'Long time,' Sugawara says, and Kuroo laughs. Kei turns his head down at the sound, hides his blush and smiles for nothing at the wet wood of the countertop.

 

'Him too,' Kuroo says, and Kei looks up, raises his eyebrows, looks away quickly. He feels strangely _shy,_ in this moment, none of the confidence he had in approaching Kuroo the last time they both were right here. Doesn't even know what he's doing here in the first place, except that he does know. The extent to which their bond dictates their movements even when they don't let it dictate more important things is alarming. He _knew,_ somewhere, earlier in the evening, that Kuroo would be here. He wonders who made the original decision to go, who influenced who, whose fault it will eventually be.

 

When a song comes on that he already knows Kuroo likes, he looks up again, and there it is. The stare, less (or even more) controlled this time, like Kuroo could write a manual on how to dismantle Kei right in the middle of this club, in the middle of this club. This time it's Kuroo who steps closer, and Kei doesn't think he could ever have stopped him. Sugawara is strategically missing, tending to the group of yelling students at the other end of the bar.

 

'What are you doing?' Kei says when Kuroo is just inches from him.

 

A smile like knives. His hand is close enough to Kei's that he worries the air will catch fire, but— 'Not touching,' Kuroo says.

 

Kei snorts, rolls his eyes. 'Why are you doing this?'

 

The smile slips off, then, and slowly. Kei feels more than sees it, the resonance sharpening to a point of pain before stopping just for a second. In that ear-ringing silence, Kuroo whispers, 'I've never been this alive.'

 

_Just kiss me. I can't believe this. Just kiss me._

 

\---

 

They are neither of them bad people. They are neither of them saints either. Leading souls to heaven or hell says nothing about their own morals; Kuroo likes to fuck with ghosts and Kei sometimes feels pity for the ones who are just on this side of the alignment, who were one deed away from purgatory and two from heaven.

 

(Hell isn't hot everywhere, even though it used to be that way, once, from what Oikawa tells him.

 

'Took us centuries,' he says, 'but we got creative then.' _Creative_ involves everything from torture cells like hospital rooms to an endless repeat of one's worst moment when living, and even if Kei doesn't really get to see any of it himself, he can imagine enough to feel sorry for all but the very worst of the people he shepherds through those large wooden doors.)

 

He's never interacted as much with as an archer as he has with Kuroo, and finally his curiosity starts to take over his apprehension. The number of nights they stay frozen at the dinner table well past their last sips of wine just to talk about _everything_ , would be more worrying if Kei would stop staring at the curl of Kuroo's golden fingers around the stem of glass— really, what is it with supernatural beings and glassware?— and the diverse but always ridiculous angles in which his hair sticks out. He is almost amazed at the fact that he's not supposed to reach out and touch Kuroo.

 

'Once they had a petition to change our doors to glass,' Kuroo's saying when Kei comes back to the conversation. 'Most stupid shit I've ever heard. What's the fun in letting them see what's waiting right off the bat? _No_ sense for drama.'

 

'And you have one?' Kei raises his eyebrows. 'A sense for drama?'

 

Kuroo sucks in a breath and then he's pushing his chair back, going down on his knees. ' _My only love sprung from my only hate,_ ' he says, spreading his arms. His delivery is beautiful; decades of practice, after all.

 

Kei's laugh slips out before he can stop it, and Kuroo lowers his arms a little, his grin abating to a smile, and all at once Kei realises how wrong this is. Not morally; they are neither of them bad people. But otherwise, it smells sharply of an underhanded rebellion, a silly, childish defiance, _not touching, not touching, we're not touching;_ they are neither of them saints either.

 

Kuroo is on his knees in front of Kei, his arms still held out, and even if Kei finished all the wine in his apartment he would not be able to reach out. They are neither saints nor sinners; they will see neither heaven nor hell, so it's up to them. It’s up to them.

 

'I should go,' Kei says softly. Neither of them moves. Neither will see either heaven or hell. Neither of them moves.

 

\---

 

'You know you can't, right?' It's the first thing Oikawa says, the moment he catches the mark on Kuroo's wrist. Kei notes absently how absurd it is to have this conversation in a restaurant as expensive as this one. Three immortals, two of them centuries old and showing each other up in a Michelin two-star while he stares fixedly at his plate. Bone china, and Oikawa's grip around his mother's cup as terrifying today as it was nine years ago. 'How old is he?'

 

Kei opens his mouth even as his stomach turns with acidic anxiety, but Kuroo fills in first. 'Over a hundred, technically.'

 

Oikawa turns back to Kei, and Kei knows he owes eye contact. When he looks up, Oikawa's eyes are blazing— quite literally. His anger is heating them up, brown melting through into red as he burns through his lenses without realising. Kei watches them disappear with sick fear as Oikawa bares his teeth, and he's never seen those red, red eyes quite like this before.

 

'You _child_ ,' Oikawa whispers through his gritted teeth. 'He could _die._ Think beyond yourself—'

 

'I'll die if they catch us,' Kuroo says, and Kei's fingers jerk on his lap as he looks away with relief. Only someone like Kuroo could think to interrupt Oikawa Tooru. Of course. Kuroo's voice is calm, deliberately light, but Kei hardly needs any sort of reminder about their situation to feel like the world is falling away from under his feet. 'We'll just have to be careful.'

 

Careful about what, Kei wants to ask. They're not touching. They _would_ just have to be careful, if they were planning to touch. They're not planning to touch. They're not touching. Oikawa's hand on the white tablecloth doesn't scare him. Kuroo's hand on the white tablecloth doesn't scare him.

 

'Not that I don't appreciate your lust for my little nerd here,' Oikawa says, 'but you work for _God._ How do you expect to run from _God_?'

 

Kuroo grins, and Kei despairs over it, shamed into silence.

 

'I have a fast car,' Kuroo says.

 

\---

 

Kei falls in love with Kuroo in that fast car. Not when he's driving it perfectly, eyes on the mirages of the highway under the wheels. Not when he's looking ahead and not at Kei, his profile beautiful in an earthly way against the quadrangle of sunset that his window frames. Not when he shakes his head and leans over to change the song, and Kei inhales his perfume, dark and rich. Not even when he shakes his head again and complains about some Koutarou's definition of good driving music.

 

No, Kei falls in love with Kuroo in that fast car when the sky turns from red to blue like he will never be able to, and Kuroo nudges his shoulder to bring it to his attention.

 

'Sorry,' he says. 'But look.'

 

They're young and old enough that missing their sliver of the stratosphere leave the day behind wouldn't have been a huge loss, but Kei still feels the backs of Kuroo's fingers branded into his shoulder and thinks, as the resonance pulses along those lines for a moment, about how Kuroo wanted to show it to him anyway.

 

'You saw both the wars,' Kei says, and Kuroo stiffens for a microsecond before nodding.

 

'I did.'

 

'You saw the '64 Olympics.'

 

'Live.'

 

'Live.'

 

'I did.'

 

Kei looks at his hands, looks at the first smattering of stars on the horizon, looks at Kuroo looking at the first smattering of stars on the horizon.

 

'You've had lots of friends.'

 

'I have.'

 

'You've had...'

 

'I have.'

 

'And you met me.'

 

Kuroo doesn't say anything for a long time; in the hush, the resonance almost crackles. He watches the road, hands on the wheel, and after the last couple of minutes it takes for the night to rise blue like a bruise, he pulls over. Even without the little lights of the dashboard and controls, Kei would have been able to see his eyes.

 

They're as golden as ever when Kuroo turns to look at him, a quiet sort of burn between the irises and the ink of the pupils.

 

'And _then_ I met you,' Kuroo says. Kei looks at him and then looks down, and away.

 

\---

 

At the end of the semester, he lets himself be dragged to three different clubs in succession, ending up at 3 AM in the one where he met Kuroo. Kageyama is drunk beyond hope, only following Hinata everywhere, and even Yachi has two spots of colour high on her cheeks. (Kei isn't a romantic, he really isn't, but he hopes that she'll remember Tadashi's coat around her the next morning.) They make a large, rowdy group, their batch, and sometimes he doesn't want to run from their company into the arms of strangers— but when they enter, Kuroo is right at the bar with a few friends of his own, leaning over and smiling so secretively at one of them that Kei's jealousy flares up before he can even scoff at it.

 

He smiles through the introductions when they come; _this is Bokuto, this is Kenma._ They're his friends, and nothing more, and Kei shouldn't care. And Kei shouldn't care. Still, he watches with interest as Kenma and Hinata hit it off almost immediately, and only glances once in a while to where Kuroo is whispering to his silver-haired friend, looking away when his own silver-haired friend calls.

 

'First pair's on me,' Sugawara says, as always, and Kei nods at him, nods at him again when they've both knocked down their shots.

 

Somewhere along their third ones, the alcohol jerks him into the kind of awareness that only comes with staying up three nights in a row and working with cardboard. This is his life, the uncomfortable, surreal mesh of vending machine coffee on Monday mornings and the echo of professor Takeda's laugh fresh in his ears even as he paces, invisible, outside the third hospital room of the night. The fatigue of being alive leading him to stumble towards a reaper of God at 4 AM in a nightclub, to grab his sleeve and tug him to— somewhere. Somewhere. Away.

 

'Tsukishima,' Kuroo says in what is hardly a murmur. 'We—'

 

'Just,' Kei says, and Kuroo is caging him in against the mirror, and behind him is an exposed brick wall that blurs and sharpens in turns in Kei's vision, and the light above his head is red, and Kei wishes Kuroo worked for the devil. Kei wishes Kuroo _was_ the devil, wishes he didn't have a bow and arrow on the wrist so close to Kei's head as Kuroo's arms slide lower from their place on the mirror. Kei wishes Kuroo didn't draw memories and hopes into people's skins for a living, wishes Kuroo hadn't seen the '64 Olympics live and taken a dozen lovers to bed, wants to be the first one, the only one, Kuroo's only love sprung from his only hate.

 

Hyperconscious, he touches. When his hands go to Kuroo's flanks, fingers climbing up the ridges of his ribs under his shirt, Kuroo curses and writhes; his heaving chest, his trembling arms; every paring of this moment is terrifying and hopeless, and for all his control and logic and for all of Kuroo's mathematics they're back to square one— he's never wanted like this before; he'll never want like this again. The resonance is a deafening static, interrupted only by Kuroo saying _Kei;_ voice like lightning, thunder of God.

 

Kuroo kisses him, and his breaths are heavy like lead. Sliding down his throat, nailing down his hands.

 

\---

 

'We held out, though,' Kuroo laughs into his neck later, when the sun is tiredly coming up and Kei's legs are tight around Kuroo's waist. They will see neither heaven nor hell. 'What was that, eight months? Nine months?'

 

'Eight,' Kei says, gasps when Kuroo moves lower, air trapped in his lungs below Kuroo's hot lips. ' _God._ '

 

'Come on, don't make it awkward. I'd rather not think about— fuck, Kei— rather not think about work in—'

 

'Just shut up,' he says, tugs on Kuroo's hair, finally touching, finally, 'just shut up. Just kiss me.'

 

_Just kiss me. I can't believe this. Just kiss me._ They will see neither heaven nor hell, so it's up to them.

 

When the sun starts glaring through the window in earnest, Kuroo is the one to stumble out of bed and close the blinds. In the new darkness, Kei can still see the gold of his eyes clearly. This was _never_ how it's supposed to be, but if they've made a not-mistake once, they can make it again. The way Kuroo swings a long leg over Kei's waist is predatory, and Kei reaches up and curls his hand around the back of Kuroo's neck, pulls him down, kisses him. They will see neither heaven nor hell, so it's up to them— and Kuroo growls low in his throat but his fingers are weak and shaking on Kei's arms. And that's a rebellion. Now that's a rebellion.

 

\---

 

Having Kuroo Tetsurou is very different from not having Kuroo Tetsurou. For an angel of the lord, he snores like a jackhammer sometimes, and other times gets too involved in shitty action films that don't deserve DVD's of their own.

 

He quiets down sometimes, when Tadashi and the boys are over and they're all arguing about what food to make, and Kei remembers how old he is. He wonders where Kuroo learned how to ink, but never feels like actually asking him. He swallows so many other questions, ones that come out late at night when Kuroo whimpers in his sleep and Kei wonders what he could be seeing, ones that rise during the later afternoons when Kuroo silently watches him slave over a print and huff his annoyance.

 

He makes his friendships with Kenma and Bokuto; knows that they both know, like Tadashi, the worse truth of two about the way he and Kuroo look at each other. They go out often, this strange crew of theirs, to have a drink on Sugawara and watch Bokuto try to flirt with the other regulars. Hinata tags along sometimes, and that combination is always disastrous.

 

Kei, thankfully already out of regular training under Oikawa, sneaks out of Kuroo’s arms late at night to put his suit on and wash sleep from his eyes. His tie might end up crooked by the time he’s returned, but it’s never a centimetre off when he sets out for his work. Glasses off, lenses off, shoes clean and hands cold. His zone covers a few neighbourhoods, among them a hospital which he visits most frequently. 

 

It took him nearly six months to learn how to disappear, which is almost no time in the grand scale of things. Walking unnoticed along hallways and gardens is second nature to him, to the point that sometimes he’s surprised when someone avoids knocking into him during the day. It might have been nearly a decade, but that is almost no time in the grand scale of things; the feeling of coming back and standing under steaming water and feeling the weight leave his body is still strange sometimes.

 

And because of that, he is often bemused at how quickly quotidian the sight of Kuroo frying vegetables becomes. They cook and eat together when they can, and Kei hasn't left his apartment but he might as well have moved into Kuroo's. He packs a week's worth of clothes when he goes over, and Kuroo has his allergens memorised. It's more than they theoretically deserve, but when Kuroo smiles it's like knives and Kei has a convenient memory.

 

\---

 

Loving Kuroo Tetsurou isn't very different from not loving Kuroo Tetsurou. On some nights they do things that Kei can hardly reduce to making love. Kuroo jokes often that it might be the last night, and Kei doesn't tell him that every night is the last night, because if he did, Kuroo would stop and go _we don't know that, we don't know._ His hands are always maddeningly slow while Kei's roam restlessly wherever they can reach; arms, shoulders, neck, back. 

 

Over him, Kuroo makes for a copper sky; under him a gilded earth. Always, he is as forbidden to him as ever.

 

\---

 

Loving Kuroo Tetsurou isn't very different from not loving Kuroo Tetsurou; it had slipped into reality the very first time Kuroo touched him and brought the resonance to life. But _having_ Kuroo Tetsurou is so very different from not having him that Kei can no longer remember what it was like, trying to make do with only his presence.

 

In the sunlight, he always looks devastatingly beautiful. They go for a lot of early, early, early morning drives now, the illusion of the night's safety to sin sifting through their twined fingers a little more each time. Kei is hopeless enough that he sometimes takes Kuroo's hand when the road is empty, and Kuroo is hopeless enough to let him take it. They still talk about everything from cabbages to kings, and Kuroo laughs just as hard at Kei's impressions of Hinata as Kei does at Kuroo's accounts of something that happened fifty years ago.

 

Sometimes Kei drives, and Kuroo has no shame; he turns three quarters in his seat and runs his fingers over Kei's cheek over and over and over again, looking at him, looking almost through him sometimes. Kei comments on it once, and Kuroo laughs, says _sometimes I'm distracted from being so distracted by you._ It only makes sense for a few seconds at a time, when Kei frowns and focuses, but then again there are lot of things about Kuroo that only make sense for a few seconds at a time, when Kei frowns and focuses. The way he chops onions, with a larger knife than necessary; the way he organises his DVD collection in a system only he can understand; the way he frowns and focuses on Kei.

 

\---

 

Oikawa's words always hang over his head, but Kei is twenty one— he is _only_ twenty one— and loving Kuroo Tetsurou isn't very different from not loving Kuroo Tetsurou. It comes with the kind of ease that makes it seem imperceptible to others, and yet with the kind of potency that takes over his being. He deludes himself that the latter will be overlooked by the powers that employ them.

 

And yet— one night, when Kuroo is biting into his neck and Kei is clawing into his back, there is a single crack of thunder, one flash of lightning as bright as day. And then Kei's window breaks, and in that moment he is convinced that he is going to die.

 

He throws Kuroo off him, hunting around for his clothes before the air of separation can even soothe their bodies. Kuroo catches the shirt Kei hurls at him, but the protest is loud on his mouth.

 

'Get out of here,' Kei says, slowly, lowly. 'If they touch you, I'll— get out of here.'

 

'Kei—'

 

'Get _out_.'

 

\---

 

He sleeps in the shards for days.

 

\---

 

It's only then that Tadashi asks.

 

'Who was he?' he says, quietly, when Kei is trying to understand what their professor is saying. 'Tsukki, what the hell?'

 

'Just someone I met,' Kei says. He knows Tadashi's not buying it, but the reason they get along so well is that Tadashi doesn't ask follow-up questions. Much like Sugawara, he politely ignores Kei's occasional disappearances and night terrors, pretends that he doesn't know why Kei has a blinding white suit and a red tie that he never wears to juries. 

 

(Kei's always loved Tadashi, but never been more thankful for his knowledge than he was on the day he ran, eighteen and stumbling, into the boy's arms and cried for half an hour over a soul he had met who had stolen to feed his son. The number of people who know about reapers is surprising; the number who understand more so— because after all, Oikawa, who had had nothing encouraging to say even for a thirteen-year-old Kei seeing a ghost for the first time, had merely laughed darkly in Kei’s pale face and said something along the lines of _youth_ and _you’ll learn_.)

 

'You know I saw his tattoo.'

 

Kei frowns at the board. He has no idea what's written on it, except that there are lines and numbers, as there are every day. He wants to build things; Kuroo always laughed about that. He should've built something around Kuroo.

 

'Tsukki.' Tadashi's snapping his fingers, waving his hand. 'Hey. Let's drop it, okay?'

 

'Just someone I met,' Kei says.

 

'You look like shit,' Tadashi informs him, and Kei can't even use his words to agree. It's too tiring to breathe.

 

\---

 

He returns to the club with shameless abandon now. Kuroo would have been the older one no matter what, after all, and the onus to avoid Kei is his. He can exchange a few cubic metres of the void in his chest for that measure of immaturity, and Sugawara always offers him a free shot.

 

'Where is he?' he asks, now, keeping his voice in the bounds of barmanly concern. Kei knows there are more questions in his mind than he will show in his eyes, but Sugawara, like Tadashi, doesn't ask follow-up questions.

 

'Who knows?' he answers. 'Not here, that's for sure.'

 

A song Kuroo likes starts to filter through the crowd, keeping rhythm with the feeble attempts the resonance makes to rise to his chest again, and Kei, out of spite, chews right through his slice of lime.

 

\---

 

Of all people, of course life would go on for them. The idea that compared to how long he is going to live his time with Kuroo will be almost microscopic, keeps him up on five nights out of seven. The other two, he puts on a pair of headphones and listens to music he loved before he met Kuroo, and takes more care than before not to spill his coffee on his models.

 

Life goes on. However terribly, however dully, however strangely. The first weeks had crawled and brought with them the head-clearing smell of whiskey and unwelcome sunrises, but as winter, surfeited, gives way to spring, he can look at almost everything in the world and not think of Kuroo. It takes effort, but it's a necessary effort, the way he knows he has to work and work on his drafts until they are perfect enough to stump the jury. Kei has always harboured a streak of shying from effort, but self-preservation comes above anything else. He's still human enough for that.

 

The resonance gave up in the dead of one night, when he was still feeling phantom stings from the little pieces of Kuroo left in his sheets. When it left, it didn't vanish without a trace— rather, it left behind a kind of hollowness too ephemeral to treat with medicine, and too physical to will away. He'll call it an annoyance at best; he is not a saint, and he has an ego. He will see neither heaven nor hell, and now he has to live forever with an ache in his bones. His mother was right. His mother was right.

 

\---

 

He's in the process of training himself not to let his heart jump to his throat every time he sees a man in a blue tie, when Kuroo apparently decides that he has held out for long enough. Kei's not going to lie, the part of him that kept hoping that Kuroo would try to see him despite everything never quite died, but his surprise is real even so. He almost drops his pencil when Kuroo comes barging quite literally through his door, followed by a slower, more silent Oikawa.

 

Kei takes a moment to calm the roaring in his ears and the wild flare of the resonance; his hands are shaking with it, and the sight of Kuroo looking so blessedly pained to see him is almost too much. They stare at each other, and Kei knows that Kuroo is taking in the rare sight of him without his glasses and lenses, and lets him do it.

 

Then Kuroo is looking away, collecting himself, and Kei reaches the question of what they are doing here in the first place.

 

'It's almost midnight,' he says.

 

'Tell us,' Kuroo says, and Oikawa sighs.

 

'You're not going to like this—'

 

'Just tell us.'

 

It's messy, Oikawa explains. He's spoken to a few people, looked for loopholes, studied clauses, everything that Kei himself has stayed up nights doing. (This contract, that scripture, moments of the most striking regret.) Oikawa's superiority has won out where Kei's couldn't, though; there's a possible deal.

 

Kei was only half paying attention up till that point; taking in his fill of Kuroo's drained countenance, his tired beautiful eyes, his motion of swallowing when they met Kei's, the pavonine line of his throat, God, his hands. At the sound of _deal,_ he jerks out of it and faces Oikawa properly.

 

'You lose your positions,' Oikawa says. 'But Kuroo lives from the age of twenty five. You live out mortal lifetimes.'

 

'And the catch?' Kei asks.

 

'It's a deal with the devil,' Oikawa says. 'We reap the soul.'

 

Kei's stomach turns, a sinking feeling spreading from his throat downwards, a kind of cold. Kuroo, sharp, smiling, _heavenly_ Kuroo— in _that_ place, beyond those terrible wooden doors— Kuroo, having spent so long carrying out the will of the heavens, only to—

 

'Not bad,' Kuroo says, and he has the audacity to laugh. 'I'll get to see you once in a while, though, Oikawa?'

 

For a moment, Kei is struck with the illogical fear that anything they say right now is binding; almost expects lightning to strike Kuroo right in that moment for saying something like that. He digs his nails into his palms, collects himself, finds his sarcasm.

 

'Kuroo, no,' he sighs. 'I'm not sending you to hell over my hormones.'

 

It's when Oikawa doesn't even pretend to laugh along that Kei frowns and leans forward. Kuroo has his lips parted in a laugh, a rebuttal ready on them, when Oikawa shakes his head.

 

'Not your soul, Kuroo,' he says, and Kuroo's laugh fades. He frowns too, and Oikawa sighs, closes his eyes. 

 

Opens them to look at Kei.

 

'No,' Kuroo says. 'No.'

 

Kei has perhaps never been so relieved in his life so far, the cold dissipating as quickly as it had started spreading. He sits a little straighter, fifty questions in his mind, and he opens his mouth to ask them all.

 

' _No_ ,' Kuroo snarls. 'Are you fucking listening to me, Kei?'

 

'I am,' Kei says, but he's also not. The dull roar in his ears his back, the resonance dancing. He's embarrassingly giddy with it, the possibility of living freely, walking freely, laughing freely with Kuroo, and he doesn't even care how sad Oikawa looks. 'Can you explain the detai—'

 

Then Kuroo is hauling him up— his touch sending Kei's frayed senses into overdrive— knocking their foreheads together, hissing out a furious breath. 'Tsukishima. I'll _never_ forgive you, I swear to—'

 

'God?' Kei says, raises an eyebrow even though his heart is thudding out of control. 'You won't have to run anymore.'

 

'You know you don't have to tell me right now,' Oikawa says. 'No lives are on the—'

 

Kuroo's grip on his collar lets up for a moment; his hands move up to cradle Kei's jaw, and he doesn't seem to care that Oikawa is right there because he presses their lips together and Kei closes his eyes. It's been too long, and not actually that long at all, and God, how fucked they are.

 

'We can run,' Kuroo breathes against his mouth. 'You, me, my fast car—'

 

'I still want to be an architect,' Kei says, thinks _I can't have you live your life on the edge of a sword._

 

'And living my fucking life knowing you're— that's better? No. No. You hear me?'

 

Kei laughs a little as the gentle argument of their lips continues, hopes Oikawa is looking away. 'It's a bond,' he says. 'Look, I know we didn't ask for this.'

 

He doesn't have a statement to follow that one. He knows they didn't ask for this; wouldn't have turned his head to look at Kuroo if he'd known what would happen after— and yet the ugly truth of it lies not in some kind of twisted fate or uncontrollable mating, but rather in the asinine decisions they made while conscious of their realities. They will see neither heaven nor hell. They have to live with it, or die without.

 

'We'll figure it out. Tsukki _._ '

 

He almost laughs again at the nickname, but what makes him stop is:

 

‘ _Please_.’

 

Or rather, the waver in Kuroo's voice that comes with it makes him stop. In a few chilling seconds his senses return to him, the loud ticking of his clock on the wall, his working lamp in his peripheral vision, Kuroo's hands on his face and his on Kuroo's chest. Two savage heartbeats, the resonance at a head on the tips of his fingers. He never planned to love anyone quite as much as he loves Kuroo, it's true, and he sure as hell never planned to choose someone from heaven to be devoted to. He remembers the tears in his mother's eyes, still, and understands her grief— the thought of living a useless eternity without everyone he loves is horrid; he wonders how Kuroo even did it so far, how others even do it. He's never loved like this before; he couldn't afford to.

 

Kuroo's desperate lips on his own hurt him, his desperation hurts him, but not enough. He’s always been that special, dangerous brand of selfish; they are neither of them saints. And the part of him which is not a saint rears its head, sings that Kuroo might be angry, but he won't be able to resist Kei forever. Especially not when they'll no longer have forever—

 

But if one sees heaven and the other hell, and they cannot come together to talk about it, then they're back to where they began. They will see neither heaven nor hell. So it's up to them.

 

Kei smiles against those desperate lips, pats Kuroo's hands where they're on his face, then pries them away. Turns to face Oikawa.

 

'Thank you for your help,' he says. 'But we'll be fine.'

 

Neither of them are sinners either, he thinks, as he feels more than sees Kuroo slump next to him. Not quite, even if the red of Oikawa’s eyes says otherwise. And after all, his soul _and_ their immortality in exchange for that despair on Kuroo's face is worse than seeing neither heaven nor hell.

 

Oikawa doesn't allow any expression to cross his face. 'Big boys, huh?'

 

'Big boys.'

 

\---

 

They're allowed an hour. They use thirty nine minutes to argue over Kei's placement of the garage in his model. Kei almost breaks into hysterical laughter upon three occasions, watching Kuroo glare down at the table with his sleeves rolled up, pointing and making a sarcastic remark about something or the other. He's not going to die, Kei has to tell himself. He's never going to die.

 

Kuroo catches him staring, then, and looks up. Even at this hour, in this light, Kei is as drawn to him as he was over a year ago. The house he dreams of building one day stands between them, and there is no joke left to make about it.

 

He lets Kuroo be the one to reach out just for the pain of taking his hand for the last time. When Kuroo pulls him forward, he feels the axis of his body already beginning to readjust, shifting to whatever painful position it will hold for the rest of infinity. He ignores it, ignores it deliberately as they kiss.

 

'Shit,' Kuroo whispers, when they part for breath— seven minutes left— and tightens his arms around Kei's waist. 'Should've taken the car.'

 

'And run?' Kei says, allows himself a smile when Kuroo laughs. He only has to keep smiling for six and a half minutes.

 

Then Kuroo stops laughing, slowly, gently, and leans forward to kiss Kei's cheek.

 

'Do me a favour,' he murmurs into Kei's ear. 'Take a really, really long shower after this.'

 

'Wash away the sin, really?'

 

'It'll help for today.'

 

Five minutes. It's laughable, all the things God and the devil expect him to say and hear and feel in five minutes and be satisfied with forever. It's laughable, but he doesn't feel like laughing anymore, and if he allowed himself to make a sound he knows Kuroo's chest would cave as well, and they can't have that.

 

Two and a half minutes. Kuroo takes a deep breath and straightens up a little, rises to press his lips to Kei's forehead. Kei accepts his silent _thank you,_ closes his eyes against the texture of his kiss.

 

Thirty seconds. _I didn't even ask you where you learned to ink,_ he wants to say, but Kuroo is stepping back and smiling at him. When he smiles it isn’t like knives. It isn’t like knives at all. There are no tears in his eyes, and none in Kei's. With every step backwards the Kuroo takes, Kei feels the resonance faltering and weakening, tangling with his nerves in its panic. He tries to pull in air through his mouth, tries to memorise the image of Kuroo standing in the middle of the room, cardboard model behind him, the little lamp lighting up his edges, making him look like— an angel.

 

'Be good,' Kuroo says, and the thrumming snaps.

 

'Get out.’ 

 

\---

 

Forty one minutes after, he picks himself off the floor and changes the position of the garage. It's the least he can do. He has to remake a lot of the model, sliding out panels from here and there, cutting windows bigger, uprooting plastic trees and settling them down somewhere else. 

 

The various supply stains on his arms grow in number as he works through the night, along with a few small nicks here and there when his blade gets away from him. He drinks enough coffee to be unable to recognise its taste by the time the sun must be rising outside his closed blinds, but his hands don't shake. He might never be jittery again.

 

In the end when he steps away with his hands on his hips and stares at it sightlessly, the model only looks remotely like what it did before. But the garage is where Kuroo said it should be. It's the least he can do.

 

\---

 

Kenma texts him eleven days later, when he's determinedly not staggering out of the first round of juries. It says _don't worry if the parlour is closed, he'll be back._

 

_I didn't plan on checking,_ he replies, because he didn't. He's sectioned off that part of the city in his head, along with a long list of songs and anything to do with Shakespeare. It's what he should've done in the beginning, before he knew that these would be the things he'd have to section off in his head one day. He doesn't plan on checking. He plans to study, work, and build things. He plans to live his life with Tadashi and Akiteru and his family and friends until— he plans to not vomit. He plans to not vomit. He plans to not vomit.

 

\---

 

The water is hot. Hilariously, painfully: he has never been able to take cold water, always prefers to cloud his vision with steam and step out only when he is flushed and barely able to breathe.

 

The water is hot. Scalding, almost, where it touches his hands over his scalp. He ignores it as silently as he can, although he wants to hiss and step away and press himself against cold tile, slide down against it perhaps, lean his forehead against the wall and catch his breath. He doesn't allow himself the luxury; stands tall and unnecessarily proud, turns his face up into the flow, eyes closed, mouth closed.

 

The water is hot. The slide of a drop down the bridge of his nose tickles, and he shakes his head. Moves his hands lower, presses his thumbs just under his ears, over his pulse, trails them back to the nape of his neck, fingernails bluntly scratching the back of his head. His hair is almost viciously clean, squeaking under his fingertips when he tugs on it, and so is the rest of his body. He knows. He's been in here for an hour, more, maybe.

 

His shoulders are tense, he knows, to the point that pressing into them would make him cry out. So he does, and then he doesn't cry out, and even though he almost wants to kneel from the pain, he doesn't do that. He stands tall and unnecessarily proud, keeps his chin up, feels the hot water on his forehead.

 

His heart isn't doing anything spectacular inside his chest; it'll only prove itself when it keeps beating with the same vigour and uselessness a hundred lonely years from now. Still, he splays his palm over it to feel the dull thump, while his other hand trails absently over his ribs, his stomach, the handles of his hips. Those sharp bones dig into the heel of his palm, and the water is not as hot by the time it reaches there. He curves his hand, lets it collect in the makeshift cup, then lets it flow through again. It's as clean at the bottom, going down his thighs and knees and shins and pooling briefly at his feet, as it was at the top.

 

He can feel newly born when he steps out, then. Every time he stands under this water, it washes him clean in the most physical and proverbial ways. So he stands tall and unnecessarily proud; the water is hot, and he burns without a word.

 

\---

 

Twenty seven days later, Sugawara tells him his tie is crooked, and for the first time, watches intently as Kei fixes it.

 

There's a small smile on his face, as if he's observing a child. Kei can't help but tense; it's been years since he started coming to this place, and there's never been a time when Sugawara hasn't been there to listen, but it's only been twenty seven days. He doesn't want to talk about it. He'll never want to talk about it.

 

'You're well-read in all the major scriptures, I presume,' he says, and Kei freezes completely. His fingers are still on the silken knot of his blood red tie, and tonight he hasn't changed his suit either. It's viciously white in the lighting of the club, and stark against the dark wet wood of the counter.

 

'Pardon?'

 

It's nothing like the resonance because nothing ever will be, but his heart picks up anxious speed when Sugawara leans forward, rests his elbows on the same counter. Kei hesitates, then lifts his gaze to meet Sugawara's. What he sees there has his hands faltering visibly, then clutching at his tie as if it's a fucking lifeline.

 

Upwards of the curl of his lips, instead of the warm brown Kei is used to, Sugawara's eyes are the kind of icy blue no mortal should have. And Kei feels the same kind of dull realisation that he'd felt all that time ago when he'd seen Kuroo's eyes for the first time, except this is accompanied by pure instinctual fear for one second. He's done _shots_ with this being.

 

'The scriptures,' Sugawara repeats. 'I imagine you must have been curious about all of them after Oikawa took you under his wing.'

 

If Kei could speak, he doubts he'd have anything intelligent to say. The music is too loud, the lights are too bright, the air is too cold. In theory, he knows and remembers that he had indeed taken it upon himself to read whatever scriptures he could get his hands on, across continents and cultures. In application, he can't bring himself to close his mouth in order to open it again, so talking seems to be an impossible task at the moment.

 

Sugawara is kind enough to laugh softly. He closes his eyes for a moment longer than usual, and when he opens them, they're back to brown. 'Is that better?'

 

'But Kuroo didn't know,' Kei says.

 

'He's too young to sense it,' Sugawara replies, and Kei wants to run from the implication. 'So, scriptures.'

 

'Scriptures.'

 

'Tell me, have you come across any stories of Solomon?'

 

'Just the one,' he says, blankly, dazedly. 'The judgement.'

 

'The judgement,' Sugawara echoes. 'That's right.'

 

'I— I don't want to be rude, but I'm—'

 

'Not quite in the mental position to infer, I know.' He smiles again, and it hasn't been long enough, so for Kei he reverts to the bartender he's always known. 'Maybe some lime will brighten you up, what say?'

 

Kei manages to snort and shake his head, and manages not to spill his shot when Sugawara slides it to him. First pair on the house, as always; he's been letting an angel serve him alcohol. Tadashi's face is going to be a riot.

 

When he's done pretending he can take the acid of the lime, he looks back up at Sugawara and opens his mouth with purpose this time. 'What am I missing?'

 

Sugawara takes his time to put the glasses away, the lime, the salt. He rolls his sleeves a little higher and wipes down the counter with a cloth, all the while ignoring Kei.

 

Finally, he says: 'We test rebels. It's cruel, I know, but we can't have two immortals running around and causing trouble between worlds.'

 

Kuroo can't be anywhere near, but Kei feels that telltale thrumming again, starting subtle and soft from the base of his spine and the insides of his arms. At its worst, the resonance is an empty itch like the one he tries to wash away under so much hot water every morning. At its most addictive, it has brought him to twist and turn in the grip of Kuroo's hands as if it were a tempest struggling to escape his skin. But this trembling— quiet, scared, debilitatingly hopeful— this, he knows, will knock him back to the ground if nothing comes of it.

 

'You're young too,' Sugawara says as it spreads from his arms to his hands, the joints of his wrists. 'The youngest I've ever seen make the right choice.'

 

'The right choice?' It's pulsing through his palms now, traveling up his back, settling between his shoulder blades. Quavering there like a ghost pair of wings; every time he has blinked since that night has always shown him Kuroo's backlit likeness. He needs to catch his breath; the onset is physical.

 

'It must have been terribly tempting, the deal.'

 

'It was.' Creeping like tendrils around his upper arms, growing downwards until his knees are shaking. 'It was.'

 

Then two things happen, almost at the same time— but he's seeing everything in detail, able to count every breath every human in this club is taking, and so he can differentiate easily. First, Sugawara reaches for his wrist and strokes his thumb over the frantic pulse, says, 'You've been so graceful, Kei.' And his mind snaps to Oikawa's fingers around his mother's bone china teacup—

 

Second, the resonance finally reaches his heart and takes hold of it, and as it seizes up, he senses Kuroo.

 

\---

 

‘You don’t want to know where I found him,’ Oikawa says. ‘I mean, you _do_ want to know, because—’ 

 

‘Museum,’ Kei says to his shoes, then realises he interrupted Oikawa, then remembers that it’s really the least of his concerns. 

 

They’re outside now, the four of them, possibly the most terrifying combination of not-human-beings that he could ever have thought of: two he fears beyond comprehension, one he loves beyond comprehension, and then him. Sugawara’s last statement doesn’t make any more sense than it did ten minutes ago, but his blood is pounding in his head and blurring his vision, and he wants to rewind a year and go back to losing sleep over drafts. He wants to rewind a decade, and this time, when he turns thirteen, he’ll tell his mother not to open the door.

 

'Look, we're reapers,' Oikawa says when neither Kei nor Kuroo can do anything but stare at the ground. 'We see enough shit at the workplace to not want unnecessary tragedy.'

 

'We're not evil, you know,' Sugawara says, at which Oikawa rolls his eyes.

 

'As for you, mister Solomon complex,' he says, 'was that enough drama or should I have hired a quartet?'

 

'Just doing my job, Tooru.'

 

Kei has taken very special care not to look directly at Kuroo so far, and the fact that it is taxing is beginning to show. From his side, he can cognise every single twitch of Kuroo's body, the way his hands are curled into fists, the way his chest works when he breathes. The arrhythmia of his every inhale and exhale, mirroring Kei's own disbelief.

 

'And our immortality? Our tasks?'

 

Oikawa shrugs, and Kei thinks disjointedly of how ancient he and Sugawara must be, that they can smile and shrug at his fate. The way their fingers never move a thread out of place.

 

'Make one wrong move,' Oikawa says, 'and that fast car of yours isn't going to get you _anywhere_.’

 

'But be good,' he continues, 'and you can take it wherever you want.'

 

Kei still doesn't dare to turn around. It's actually easier to look at Sugawara than at Kuroo, so he does that, and is rewarded with a smile.

 

'Go home,' Sugawara says. 

 

\---

 

They don't, not immediately. When they're left alone outside, Kei links his hands and stares down at them for the longest time, until Kuroo's slips between them. What the touch does to him is so profound that he thinks his body will take hours to register it fully, but muscle memory makes his hands curl immediately around Kuroo's. The telltale pins and needles blooming from the contact make him want to laugh.

 

They meet again in a club. Kei takes the hands no destiny said he was meant to take, and they are not too rough, not too big, not too small, not too thin. Above all, they are not cold.

 

They meet again in a club. Again, always, Kei ends up with his back to the mirror in the bathroom. They might as well make a chalk outline of him there, because it looks like Kuroo is going to devour him; his eyes flaring gold, his lips parted in almost a snarl, teeth like fangs. He prepares himself for the assault.

 

And then, all at once, the fight goes out of Kuroo and he's falling forward, and Kei's arms are going around him on instinct. Kuroo's breath against his neck is coming quick and desperate, and this time it's Kei who reaches up, touches his hair, touches his neck, touches his shoulders, arms, shuddering flanks. Kisses his jaw clumsily, pulls him closer by his hips, holds them together like he would his beloved little buildings.

 

'I couldn't sleep at night,' Kuroo laughs into his collar. 'Came this close, wanted to just— pack up and run.'

 

'I'm glad you didn't,' Kei replies. 'That would've been awkward. I wouldn't have spent money to come looking for you, you know.'

 

'Just kiss me,' Kuroo says. He doesn't follow up, because there is no joke left to make about this. They will see neither heaven nor hell. They will see neither heaven nor hell.

 

_Just kiss me. I can't believe this. Just kiss me._

 

And so Kei closes his eyes and for the first time, kisses Kuroo without electricity, without fear, without excuses. He kisses Kuroo. And he kisses Kuroo, and he kisses Kuroo, and he kisses Kuroo.

 

\---

 

('Immortality is disgusting,' Oikawa says. 'Don't let go of each other, and make some fucking friends with longer shelf lives.'

 

'Is this...is this really...?' _Is this really possible?_

 

Oikawa and Sugawara share a long, long look, then turn to him and Kuroo with twin smiles but a dichotomy of red and blue, demon and angel, but reaper and reaper once, all the same.

 

'Wouldn't we know?' Oikawa says finally.)

 

\---

 

'So you finally hit the tipping point,' Tadashi says flatly, after an entire minute of silence. 'You stayed awake too long, didn't you.'

 

'What.' Kei pinches the bridge of his nose. 'I'm serious, Tadashi.'

 

'They let you get away with it,' he says. 'You've got to be joking me.'

 

'Oh, trust me,' Kei says, and he moves a hand to the side of his neck almost automatically, where the prints of Kuroo's teeth still sting and ache. He smiles a little to himself, presses down on them. 'I'm pretty sure we're off the hook.'

 

'And your...you know. What you do.'

 

'He's on duty right now,' he replies, imagines Kuroo dressed in white; tie so blue, hair so dark, eyes so bright; imagines him, so beautiful in the sunlight hitting the rear view mirror of his fast car and shooting into his eyes, so beautiful in his statement T-shirts and obsession with _Die Hard_ , so ridiculously beautiful with the focus on his face when he moves his needles over the mortal skins of a hundred different souls.

 

Kei works for the devil, still gets into pillow fights with Akiteru at the age of twenty two, and wants to make smart buildings. Kuroo works for God, regularly gets thrown out of clubs along with Bokuto, and for a living, he inks in what permanence he can promise in this world, that lasts until death and is constant under his palm even after. 

 

_This is kind of...punk. For an angel._

 

_Just kiss me. I can't believe this. Just kiss me._

 

'He's on duty right now,' Kei repeats.

 

\---

 

Evershifting before, the resonance settles into a new but steady cadence in his chest.

 

\---

 

'Where did you learn to ink?' They're at the dinner table, and Kuroo is valiantly struggling with the stubborn cork of their favourite wine. Kei feels something silly and bright spark inside his chest with the question, and clears his throat to quiet it down.

 

'I'll tell you in a minute,' Kuroo says, glaring down at the bottle in his hands and twisting it this way and that.

 

They will see neither heaven nor hell, so it's up to them.

 

'Your minutes last forever.'

 

Then Kuroo looks up, and he'll never look at Kei with calculations again, but his smile is still like knives.

 

‘They do,’ he says.

 

It's up to them to make their own. So Kei reaches and plucks the keys out of Kuroo's chest pocket, dangles them in front of him, where they catch the blood red rays of the rising sun and explode into fireworks of reflections in Kuroo's eyes. Kuroo has a smile like knives, and they will see neither heaven nor hell. 

 

It's up to them to make their own, so they jump to their feet and run.

**Author's Note:**

> I DID IT. I WROTE ANGELS/DEMONS. MOTHER TOLD ME IT WOULD BE LIKE THIS
> 
> You can find me on [Twitter](http://twitter.com/soldierpoetking) and [Tumblr](http://sturlsons.tumblr.com). 
> 
> February is...debatable. So let's say 2016 begins with MARCH.


End file.
